Ben Cubby and Deborah Smith

THE chief scientist, Penny Sackett, says Australia is moving too slowly to bring its greenhouse gas emissions under control, exposing the nation to high risks and financial costs, after the federal government's decision to shelve its emissions trading scheme.

The warning came as a leading Chinese government adviser criticised Australia's lack of action on climate change, saying the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, had reduced the chance that the world could curb global warming before it was too late.

The rare public statement from Professor Sackett, the government's leading scientific adviser, said: "We are not acting with sufficient speed to reduce the large degree of risk that climate change poses to our health, our environment and our livelihoods."

The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, would not say whether the chief scientist had been consulted before the ETS was postponed, but she said scientists had been consulted regularly about climate change.

Meanwhile, 255 members of the US National Academy of Scientists, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates, issued the strongest statement since the Copenhagen conference defending the rigour and objectivity of climate science. They called for an end to "McCarthy-like threats" of criminal prosecution of researchers.

Professor Sackett told the Herald she was concerned by the government's decision to delay its ETS legislation.

Advertisement

"Any action that is delayed puts us at higher risk of dangerous climate change," she said.

The US National Academy of Scientists criticised the harassment of scientists by politicians "seeking distractions to avoid taking action".

"We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular," the group, supported by the president of the Australian Academy of Science, Kurt Lambeck, wrote in a letter to the journal Science.

The US academy members said evidence for man-made climate change was strong, and many of the assaults by climate change sceptics were "typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence".

The decision to postpone the ETS until 2013 at the earliest was driven by some in the ALP, including in the NSW Right, who had become worried by focus groups that suggested public opinion was cooling on climate change.

The cost of starting the scheme would also have appeared as a large fiscal hump in the road before next week's federal budget. By removing it from the four-year forward estimates, the cabinet's strategic priorities and budget committee saved $2.5 billion.

Senator Wong said the government accepted the scientific view that climate change was real, and said the decision to delay the ETS was based on changing domestic and international circumstances.

"The challenge of climate change has not gone away and continues to require strong domestic and international action," she said.

"The government remains committed to the carbon pollution reduction scheme."